In 1956, Ho Kan formed the Ton-Fan Group with his contemporaries including Li Yuan-chia, Wu Hao, and Hsiao Ming-hsien, who shared a passion for merging elements of traditional Chinese and Western art—in particular American abstraction—to revolutionise Chinese painting. One of Taiwan’s first modern artist groups, the Ton-Fan Group was often discussed called ‘The Eight Bandits’ or ’ The Eight Rebels’ (八大響馬) by the media for rejecting artistic conventions and academic training.
Ho Kan’s early works were concerned with ‘mental images’, in which he would capture abstracted images of animals in a muted colour palette such as in Untitled (1960). Simple geometric shapes of the circle, triangle, and squares began to enter Ho’s paintings more frequently in the mid-1960s, following his move to Italy, and the following decade saw the artist introduce brighter and denser colours to his canvases, using short lines and composition.
